Top Book Blogs 05/2018

Out this week: The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner; Adjustment Day by Chuck Palahniuk; A Lucky Man by Jamel Brinkley; The Pisces by Melissa Broder; and Motherhood by Sheila Heti. Want to learn more about upcoming titles? Then go read our most recent book preview. Want to help The(May 1, 2018)

[The Millions] May Preview: The Millions Most Anticipated (This Month)

We wouldn’t dream of abandoning our vast semi–annual Most Anticipated Book Previews, but we thought a monthly reminder would be helpful (and give us a chance to note titles we missed the first time around). Here’s what we’re looking out for this month — for more May titles, check(May 1, 2018)

[Guardian Books Blog] Reading group: which modernist book should we read this month?

From James Joyce to HG Wells, the efforts of 20th-century writers to find fresh forms for new times have not grown old. Please share your innovative choicesThis month on the reading group we’re going to make it new. In May, it’s 75 years since the first collected edition of TS Eliot’s Four(May 1, 2018)

[Book Forum] OMNIVORE: Threat to the Iran nuclear deal

Can anyone stop Trump from blowing up the Iran nuclear deal?(May 1, 2018)

Antoni Porowski, the food expert from Netflix’s Queer Eye, is writing a cookbook. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2019, the still-untitled book “will continue to promote the simple, healthy, visually appealing fare that marked his culinary approach on the Netflix reboot.” In a(May 1, 2018)

[Book Forum] OMNIVORE: Mueller’s next big move

Donald Trump will do anything to avoid prosecution(May 1, 2018)

[Book Forum] VIDEO: Alexander Chee & Joseph Osmundson

(May 1, 2018)

[Book Forum] OMNIVORE: What is happening

Depends on who you’re offending(May 1, 2018)

[Book Forum] OMNIVORE: The white nationalist

Masculinity, not ideology, drives violent extremism(May 1, 2018)

[Book Forum] OMNIVORE: Human futures in space and SETI

Social imaginaries of outer space and the capitalist accumulation of the cosmos(May 1, 2018)

[The Millions] Must-Read Poetry: May 2018

Here are six notable books of poetry publishing in May. Tropic of Squalor by Mary Karr Scorched, palpable, sometimes pungent, sometimes brutal: Karr’s new collection is a mixture of tight narratives that end without resolution, hymns of unsettled suffering, and confused prayers. Writing years(May 2, 2018)

[Book Forum] OMNIVORE: On animal extinctions

Humans are creating new species despite killing off so many(May 2, 2018)

Rachel Kushner talks to Entertainment Weekly about art, activism, and her new book, The Mars Room. Although some recent works on the criminal justice system, like Serial and Making a Murderer, have led to activism, Kushner says that wasn’t her aim in setting The Mars Room in a women’s prison.(May 2, 2018)

Anya Yurchyshyn’s debut memoir My Dead Parents is a gut-punch, but not for the reasons you might expect. Yurchyshyn’s account runs counter to traditional narratives of loss: after a fraught childhood and adolescence, she mostly felt relief when her parents died (her father in a car accident and(May 2, 2018)

In her 2016 novel Home Fire, the author created a Tory home secretary with Pakistani Muslim parents – an idea she initially dismissed as ridiculous“Nostrashamsie,” a friend tweeted at me when Sajid Javid was appointed home secretary this week. My novel Home Fire, published last year, has among(May 3, 2018)

Melissa Broder was famous before you even knew who she was. In 2012, she launched the anonymous Twitter account @sosadtoday. Armed with a wry sense of sarcasm, Broder wrote poignant and irreverent words of wisdom 140 characters at a time. Now with over 600,000 followers, Broder came out publicly as(May 3, 2018)

The Loudest Voice in the Room author Gabriel Sherman is working on a screenplay about Donald Trump. According to the Hollywood Reporter, The Apprentice will follow Trump’s road to fame and the presidency, “focusing on his early influences like attorney Roy Cohn.” In a statement, Sherman(May 3, 2018)

[Book Forum] VIDEO: Criticism and Social Justice, co-presented with the National Book Critics Circle

(May 3, 2018)

[Book Forum] OMNIVORE: No one knows why

The same handful(May 3, 2018)

[The Millions] Recommended Flash Fiction from the Editors of 100 Word Story

As writers and editors of flash fiction, we love stories that are structured around a story’s gaps, the nuanced caesuras of what’s left out. In fact, the promise of a good flash story—a genre usually defined as being less than 1,000 words—is the way a narrative moves through an escalating(May 3, 2018)

[The Millions] The Millions Top Ten: April 2018

We spend plenty of time here on The Millions telling all of you what we’ve been reading, but we are also quite interested in hearing about what you’ve been reading. By looking at our Amazon stats, we can see what books Millions readers have been buying, and we decided it would be fun to use(May 3, 2018)

[Book Forum] OMNIVORE: The problem isn’t that Facebook is creepy

Nothing is going to happen to Facebook or Mark Zuckerberg(May 3, 2018)

[The Millions] Returning to Analog: Typewriters, Notebooks, and the Art of Letter Writing

1. In 2009, Cormac McCarthy sold his Olivetti Lettera 32 typewriter at Christie’s for $254,500. With it, he wrote close to five million words over the course of five decades, including his highly regarded novels The Road and Blood Meridian, and the Border Trilogy, which brought him commercial(May 4, 2018)

[Book Forum] DAILY REVIEW: Of Infamous Women

Rachel Kushner’s prison novel(May 4, 2018)

[Book Forum] OMNIVORE: What trouble Trump is in

The constitutional crisis phase will now commence(May 4, 2018)

[Book Forum] OMNIVORE: Your privacy concerns

Privacy has never been on offer(May 4, 2018)

[Guardian Books Blog] 'Single women fiction': how a genre went from subversive to sad

Amazon’s new pigeonhole for books about unmarried females is far more old-fashioned than the ‘New Woman novel’ tag deployed in the 19th centuryGenres are funny things. For every copy of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake that gets shelved under fiction, there’s someone who’ll argue that it(May 4, 2018)

Lucas Films "I've always been a geek," film critic and author A.D. Jameson writes in the introduction to his new book, "and what's more, I'm old enough to remember when it wasn't cool to be one." Suffice to say that's no longer the case; geek culture has taken(May 4, 2018)

[Book Forum] PAPER TRAIL: Drama at the “New York Times” over new Hillary book

BuzzFeed news reports on the newsroom drama at the New York Times in response to Amy Chozick’s new book, Chasing Hillary, about the paper’s coverage of the 2016 campaign. Times staffers have expressed misgivings that the book contains private comments from colleagues, an inside look at the(May 4, 2018)

[Book Forum] VIDEO: John Freeman (editor of Tales of Two Americas) at the FYE® Conference 2018

(May 4, 2018)

[Book Forum] OMNIVORE: Same way

It’s worse than you think(May 4, 2018)

[Book Forum] OMNIVORE: Antifa’s secret weapon

Anti-fascism beyond the headlines(May 4, 2018)

[Book Forum] OMNIVORE: The politics of public education

Are private schools immoral?(May 4, 2018)

[The Millions] 87 Years Delayed: New Zora Neale Hurston

New York Magazine has an excerpt up from Zora Neale Hurston‘s long-lost manuscript, Barracoon: The Story of the Last Black Cargo, the first-person account of Cudjo Lewis, the only living survivor of the final slave ship to land in America. Barracoon will finally, 87 years later, be(May 5, 2018)

[The Millions] Black on all Sides

“The company has forged a chain uncommon in mainstream publishing: an unbroken line of black women, from the novel’s protagonist, via the author, to the editor, to the art director who created the cover art (featuring a black woman).” Meet the trio of Black women at Kensington(May 5, 2018)

[The Millions] Plant That (Literary) Flag

“In no particular order, except one of hallelujah, here’s a necessarily partial list of some other living Korean American writers whose work or person, or both, I’ve had the great good luck of encountering”….you’ll have to read the interview for the lengthy list as well(May 5, 2018)

[The Millions] The Nobel Will Return in 2019

“These elements of scandal, by now familiar in the #MeToo era, claimed an unusual casualty on Friday: The Nobel Prize in Literature, the world’s most prestigious accolade for writing.” In the wake of a sex abuse scandal, The Swedish Academy announced it will postpone this year’s(May 6, 2018)

[The Millions] On (Not) Being a Mother

“The lie I told most often in my twenties during the Reagan era was that I liked other people’s children although I didn’t intend to have my own.” For The Rumpus, Kyoko Mori writes an essay on the choice to raise animals instead of children. Pair with: an essay on the complexities(May 6, 2018)

[Salon Books] The pivotal place of the ancient Greeks in the history of drunkenness

Shutterstock The following passage from "A Short History of Drunkenness:How, Why, Where and When Humankind has Gotten Merry from the Stone age to the Present," by Mark Forsyth, is about the pivotal place of Ancient Greeks in party culture.The Greeks didn’t drink beer, they drank wine;(May 6, 2018)

[Salon Books] The enduring magic of “Caddyshack”: How it helped usher in a new age of American comedy

Warner Bros. It’s been nearly 40 years since the release of the iconic American comedy “Caddyshack,” but when the film debuted back in 1980, nobody would have predicted it would become a classic. Chris Nashawaty, film critic at Entertainment Weekly and the host on Sirius XM's EW radio(May 6, 2018)

[The Millions] The Pleasure Is in the Guilt: The Millions Interviews Lucas Mann

Lucas Mann is interested in everything. Sincerely. His first book Class A followed a minor league baseball team in rural Iowa but was really a mediation on small-town Americana. His second book was an in-depth exploration of who exactly his charismatic and ambitious brother was before a heroin(May 7, 2018)

[Guardian Books Blog] Poem of the week: Old Poem by Anonymous, translated by Arthur Waley

The bare scene that greets an old soldier returning from long service is understated but deeply affectingAt fifteen I went with the army,At fourscore I came home.On the way I met a man from the village,I asked him who there was at home.“That over there is your house,All covered over with trees and(May 7, 2018)

[Book Forum] PAPER TRAIL: Nobel Prize in Literature cancelled; Ronan Farrow on his new book

The Swedish Academy has announced that there will be no Nobel Prize in Literature this year. The decision comes in the wake of a sexual harassment scandal, in which photographer Jean-Claude Arnault—who is married to one academy member and friends with others—has been accused of abusing and(May 7, 2018)

[Book Forum] OMNIVORE: Marx at 200

Is Karl Marx still relevant in the 21st century?(May 7, 2018)

[Book Forum] OMNIVORE: The Republican Party, not Trump, is the real threat

Someday Donald Trump will be as respected as Ronald Reagan(May 7, 2018)